Computing platforms, such as personal computers and gaming consoles, represent a wide variety of hardware architectures, software environments, configuration data formats, and communication protocols. While this variety provides a diversity of choices to users, it also presents a challenge with respect to providing a consistent experience to users who regularly use different types of platforms, as well as interactivity between the different platforms.
For example, while a user may play the same game on a game console, on a portable gaming system, and over the Internet on a personal computer, the game experience is in general that of playing three different copies of the same game, and not that of playing one game using three different platforms. Therefore, it is desirable to allow for cross platform synchronization of game states or configuration data states and for providing interactivity between the platforms, thereby providing a consistent experience to the user.